The present invention relates generally to an information processing apparatus and method, a recording medium, and a program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, recording apparatus, and a program which are suitably of use in converting text data into speech data by text-to-speech synthesis.
Technologies are known in which software performs text-to-speech synthesis on a text entered through the keyboard of a personal computer to read aloud the speech obtained by this processing. These technologies are applied to the browsing of Web pages, the utterance of electronic mail, and the utterance of user-specified text data.
However, if entered text data is converted directly into speech data, it presents a problem that URLs of Web pages and electronic mail addresses, for example, are read aloud as a string of characters, making it more difficult for users to understand than if the data were displayed as character information. Another problem is that, if the system is preset so as to convert text data into plausible Roman letters or characters to pronounce, such speech may be meaningless to the users.